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Thursday, 29 December 2011

The Rotten Borough Tells Mr Pickles To Mind His Own Business

The Dame has been impertinent and reproduced extracts of Rowena's piece in today's Telegraph.

Sadly she overlooked the Rotten Borough where the Council is sitting on £170 millions in Reserves!

Part of our £170 millions in Reserves

Soon after the Coalition came to power, Mr Pickles urged local authorities to dig into their “piggy banks” as more than 50 were holding more than £50 million in their bank accounts. However, K&C was immune to his strictures. In fact, Mr Myers went 'on the record' as saying how RBK&C dealt with Reserves was not the business of the Secretary of State.

So what we have is an enormous windbag called Pickles whose demands are ignored by the Royal Borough of K &C. Odd when you think about it.... Pooter Cockell boasts of his close contact with Pickles as 2 day a week £53,000 a year chair of the Local Government Association. Still odder is that Baroness Hanham( Pooter's predecessor as K&C Leader) is also Pickles's Local Government Minister in the Lords.

As the Dame's favourite 'walker' the disgraced ex Mayor Barry Phelps is prone to say, 'you could not make it up'

New figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government will today reveal that local authorities are likely to have £10.8 billion in reserves by March – an increase of around £240 million on the previous year.
Councils are advised to keep sufficient sums of money in reserve so that they have a financial cushion to meet sudden unexpected costs.
But the extent of the cash piles may cast doubt on complaints by some local councils that they must make deep cuts to public service and cannot afford to freeze council tax.
Eric Pickles, the Local Government Secretary, last night said councils would have “room to manoeuvre on their finances next year” because of the huge amounts of cash on their books.
He claimed councils had been making “political cuts” that were “totally unacceptable” while sitting on vast cash reserves.
The new figures show that some of the biggest increases in reserves came from Labour-led Wakefield Council, which is expected to have more than doubled its cash pile from £21 million to £51 million by March.
Meanwhile, Labour-run Bolton Council is likely to have tripled its reserves £23 million to £81 million.
Emma Boon, campaign director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said councils should be easily able to freeze council tax given the level of reserves.
"Given the amount of reserves councils are sitting on they should at the very least all be freezing council tax this year, and many could go further,” she said.
“Local authorities could help households struggling to pay council tax, which has almost doubled in the last ten years, but instead many are hoarding large sums of taxpayers’ money. Councils should review the level of reserves as some have put aside far more as a percentage of their spending than others.”

It is headline news in the Telegraph that more than 50 Councils are hording £50 million plus in reserves. The Telegraph rightly points out that this is a scandalous state of affairs in the current climate.

The writer must have been asleep because she missed the fact that K&C is sitting on nearly £200 million of reserves from overtaxing hard pressed council tax payers. The reserves would of course have been triple this amount if the vanity projects like Holland Park School rebuild (£100 million and not a single extra space) and Exhibition Rd "shared space" (£24 million to import pink marble from China) and all the other profligate excess was factored in.

But then we know that Cllr Cockell's Hornton Street is a law onto itself. What he wants is what happens - not what the rest of the country is doing or what the residents want.

Curious why Pickles et al turn a blind eye. Building favours no doubt. As we know, this is the Tory way. What is Cockell lining up for them?

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